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“I wasn’t born in ‘77!” Arish “King” Khan declares on “Born in 77,” off Murderburgers, but he knows that you know it’s a lie. Khan turned 40 this year: The man who played bass for the Spaceshits, who dressed up like Tina Turner and howled like James Brown, who strode the grounds of the 2008 Pitchfork Fest wearing a centurion helmet and little else—that guy survived long enough to mature into a music veteran and family man. But the Gris Gris, his backing band for this album, maintain the ruse with a manic glam-punk jam, tempo-rushing piano chords, glitter-crust guitar riffs, and a sax solo that sounds like it’s being mobbed by zombies. The song is a gleefully irreverent take on the Berlin punk being played around the time Jimmy Carter was taking office, with Khan playing Iggy to producer Greg Ashley’s Bowie.

When Khan emerged more than a decade ago with the Shrines, there was still something rattling about the way he turned psych-rock and R&B conventions into vehicles for outrageous self-expression. He preached a radicalized version of freedom where each song offered some promise of triumphant escape, whether from poverty (“Welfare Bread”), gender identity (“I Wanna Be a Girl”), American exceptionalism (“Land of the Freak”), or the strictures of polite society (pretty much every other song). Idle No More, released in 2013, was his first real adult album, with a real U.S. label and a sound that buffed away some of the rough edges but maintained that sense of the ridiculous.

That charisma comes through on Murderburgers, his debut solo record and the first on his own Khannibalism Records (an imprint of Ernest Jenning Co.), although it’s more muted and even more mature. Khan once wrote about love through the lens of freakdom, as though the sexual and romantic bonds between people didn’t have to adhere to old rules or puritanical decrees. Murderburgers, on the other hand, is mostly just love songs. “It’s a Lie” plumbs romantic paranoia, but Khan can’t make anything new of it. When he sings, “I’ve see you with your arms dealers/Bombmakers and undertakers,” on “It’s Just Begun,” it’s nothing as timely as a protest song, but just another “love is a battlefield” metaphor. It’s hard to give that idea much weight when there’s a very real nuclear threat looming.

Fortunately, he’s got the reconstituted Gris Gris backing him up, and they prevent his 1960s obsession from curdling into pastiche rock. Onetime members of Khan’s vaguely defined death cult called the Kukamongas (which also included the Black Lips and Mark Sultan), the Oakland group disbanded more than a decade ago, but Khan reassembled them, seemingly by force of will, for sessions at producer Greg Ashley’s Creamery Studio. The Gris Gris add some grit to opener “Discreate Disguise” and some skronk to “Run Doggy Run,” an otherwise blandly vindictive diss track. Especially on the album’s second side, they bring some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings, with the band bashing out a snot-covered rockabilly beat on “Teeth Are Shite” and adding some gloriously sloppy guitar licks to the melancholic beach ballad “Winter Weather.” Perhaps it’s about the fate of weird Oakland in the face of encroaching gentrification (which has already claimed Creamery), or perhaps it’s a roundabout comment on being born in ’77 and alive in 2017: “When the winter weather’s done/Gimme some gimme some summer sun.”